MTHULISI SIBANDA

JOHANNESBURG  – BUSINESSES in the continent have been urged to forego security fears and embrace cloud solutions to enhance productivity.

Industry expert, Steven Cohen, expressed pity that fear-mongering and misinformation were overshadowing the benefits of cloud solutions.

“Cloud-based accounting software is simply a balance of other services we already use,” Cohen, Head of Sage One International, said.

His portfolio covers Africa, Australia, Middle East and Asia.

Cohen said while moving to the cloud might not be a necessary step right now, there were tangible business benefits associated with the move that should be considered.

He offered the benefits as affordability, money and time saving, security and ease in transition.

Cohen argued “the security card has been overplayed.”

Vendors who had been instilling fear into business owners as part of their product pitch, have propagated a large portion of this uncertainty, the expert said.

“This is even though the security risk of using existing software is often reasonably small,” he said.

“Another reason why there is not much uptake of cloud services is because of the concern around governance and data protection which plays a major role for business owners.”

Gartner, the global think-tank, states that by 2020, 95 percent of cloud security breaches will be the customer’s fault, not the result of vulnerability in the cloud technology itself.

“Given world-class data centre infrastructure in Africa, I believe the same will be true of this continent,” said Cohen.

– CAJ News